


two by two, the unclean

by Honeymull



Category: Supernatural
Genre: 2009 imported work, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-03
Updated: 2019-02-03
Packaged: 2019-10-21 16:31:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17646296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Honeymull/pseuds/Honeymull
Summary: 2009 - Written for [lj] whenthewarsover, prompt #14: "The apocalypse is over, and Dean still doesn't want to fly, but Sam convinces him to learn to sail." This...is not quite that straight-forward.





	two by two, the unclean

Sam dreams of his mother. 

He dreams that she holds his lungs and threads her fingers through his breath, pressed close and warm against him. He dreams that she catches his sad sighs like fireflies in her open fists and spreads her palms over his mouth, over his throat, that she hums lullabies that rhyme with his beating heart.

Sam dreams of his father.

He dreams of his father as an oak tree, unfurling into the sky like a colossus, reading the sky like the clouds are letters on a page, something to discover, decipher. He dreams of him as the sound of hollow bottles sitting in the wind, and of brisk hand-claps, stilted applause in an empty room.

Sam dreams of his brother. 

He dreams that Dean drifts in pieces across the earth, stumbling toward Sam across the dark line of the horizon, a blurry silhouette as far out as Sam can see. He wavers and lists with every step, one foot in front of the other, step – step - step...but he never stops walking forward. 

He dreams of Dean surrounded by sheet metal, black and strong and unyielding, and when he tells Dean about it in the morning, Dean makes a joke about Iron Man. 

Sam smiles thinly into his coffee and doesn’t bring it up again. 

 

+-+-+

 

They have a cabin, now, along what used to be Lake Michigan. The Great Lake is more massive than ever here, from the flooding of the Midwest during the eighth month of the War. The water covers miles of Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan – not that there’s use anymore for boundaries and state lines.

The cabin has a gravel driveway that snarls underneath the tires of the Impala, and the trees from the woods surrounding the cabin cup its shingled roof in their leaves. The porch is bright in the morning, the planks of wood weathered and splintered from the sun, and sooty with shade in the evenings. 

After months of chaos in the streets and smoke in the air, blood on the ground and darkness in the water, it’s an unexpected pocket of peace, tiny and still. Sometimes, Sam thinks he can almost call it home.

 

+-+-+

 

It was two months after the War ends before they found it, and another week before they could bring themselves to sleep inside the house. 

Sam thought he’d missed the plush give of a mattress, and he knew Dean was craving the softness under his head after months without even a motel cot, but that first night, the walls shifted closer with every drowsy blink of Sam’s and every turn on his pillow Dean made. 

They both ended up stumbling out the front door, down the steps of the porch, to pile into the Impala again for sleep. They curled into wide, scrunched commas: Dean on the front bench and Sam along the back seat. The Impala weathered the War with little grace, and she’s rough and fragile, but right then, she was the only freedom they trusted.

That first week, her windows fogged lightly with their breath as they slept, Dean’s hand draped over the skin of her seats and Sam’s feet pressed up hard against her bones. 

 

+-+-+

 

The only outpost for supplies near them is located on an island in the middle of Lake Michigan. Sam reaches it by boat on the fifteenth day of every month. Alfred, the little man who keeps the bunker stocked, knows him, but Sam still has to step through rings and rings of sigils, walk through devils traps painted on every surface, floor and ceiling alike. The smell of salt is heavy in the air. 

Nobody takes chances anymore, not even now. 

Sam greets Alfred with a nod. Alfred looks at him over his rifle, just like always, steady and cautious, and then lowers the gun with an answering nod. 

“Come for the missus?” Alfred never smiles, but Sam can see the tiny curl at the edges of his lips as they spread a little wider over missing teeth in his dark gums. 

Sam coughs a little, amused in spite of himself. “Dean doesn’t much like anything that’s not his car or his own feet. One of these days I’ll drag him with me.”

Alfred grunts, noncommittal as always, and turns to go further inside. Sam hoists up the bags of vegetables he trades for the packaged goods Alfred has stockpiled and follows him into the bunker without another word.

 

+-+-+

 

The cabin is dark and silent when Sam kills the boat’s engine and maneuvers into the docking traces. Their backyard is a wide stretch of beach, and Sam trudges through the sand and sparse grass softly, laden with new supplies. 

The back door is a screen door, and he glares at the sagging screen even as he toes it open and shoulders inside. He and Dean both swear to fix it every time they walk past it, but it’s been almost a year now and the screen is still just as droopy and disheveled as it always has been. 

Dean’s not inside the house, but the Impala is parked neatly in the gravel driveway. 

Dean has all the faith in the world in his car, but these days, he’s more prone to hoof it somewhere if it means less wear and tear on the Impala.

Unfortunately for Sam, Dean thinks post-it notes are for pussies, and never remembers to leave a handy note informing Sam of where he’s fucked off to. 

After all they’ve been through together, all they’ve survived, Sam only feels a tiny amount of guilt using the remaining flickers of power that still light up his blood to locate him. He’s given up everything else, been drained of every other stain that ran through his veins and made him strong (made him weak), and this – this can’t hurt anyone. He only uses it when Dean isn’t around; the entire point of it is to use it when Dean isn’t near, to find him, to know where he is. To know he’s safe. 

Sam doesn’t need a center anymore, doesn’t need to finger his amulet or lay his palms on the Impala. He just closes his eyes, feels a strum through his blood like his ribs are strings on an instrument, and Dean saunters through a golden wheat field on the back of his eyelids, distinct and clear.

Sam shivers when he opens his eyes, the image vanishing. Using these last scraps of power always makes him cold. He ignores it, grabs a hoodie from off the back of a kitchen chair and heads out the door to find Dean.

 

+-+-+

 

Dean doesn’t have anything against walking to get where he needs to be, but it feels wrong. He misses the plant of his feet against a pedal instead of the ground, and his hands curl into fists at his side, absent and unthinking, like they need a wheel around which to wrap themselves.

This, though, he thinks, this is all right. It’s a middle-of-nowhere field, and the wheat all around him is bright in the early afternoon sun. He’s in a tee-shirt, dark gray and getting darker as the heat makes him sweat, but he just turns his face up, catches the light on his cheeks and his neck. His arms are already tanner than they’ve ever been, and they burned like a bitch just like always, at first. With time, they’ve settled into a tawny color he still can’t quite get used to. Sam still has him beat, though, burning darker and deeper with each summer that passes. 

Sam told him once that Jess had always been fiercely jealous of the easy tan Sam would get under the sun, and Dean lets his mouth quirk up in a little smile at that. 

Sam talks about Jess more, now. He’s more open, at least on the surface, and Dean thinks he might even be happy sometimes. Dean has his brother and his car, and a job more or less permanently well done. He’s as happy as he could ever be. 

The stalks of wheat shuffle in the wind, and on the end of the susurrus, Dean hears Sam’s voice. 

“Seriously. It totally takes balls to tell me where the fuck you’re going. Scribble it on a napkin or something, asshole.” 

Dean blows out a breath, purses his lips and rolls his neck down from its upward gaze. Sam is mild in front of him, staring at him impassively. “Didn’t see you coming.”

Sam huffs a tiny laugh. “You were too busy communing with the clouds.” At Dean’s sharp glance, he backtracks: “Yeah, okay, no clouds. Just sky.”

Dean nods.

For a little over a month during the War, it rained. It rained and rained and never stopped, not until the fortieth night. The sun was wrapped up behind horrible, black blanket clouds for forty days. Dean nearly broke, never realized how much he craved light, craved open, cloudless skies. That was towards the end of the War, when Sam was back with him, and Sam drew Dean away from the windows, then, drew him away and made him crave Sam, made him remember a craving for other, nearer things.

Dean settles his gaze on Sam, lets it become speculative, but doesn’t say what’s on his mind. Instead, he asks, “How’d you find me?”

Sam’s gaze shutters, just slightly. “Got back from getting supplies, saw you weren’t there and…went for a walk. Saw you from the tracks.”

The skeleton of an old railroad track lies abandoned in the less wooded sections of the area, skirting through the sparse trees and emerging to flank the field they’re standing in now. About a mile away, a huge passenger train lies rotting into the ground, all massive machinery and rusted iron. It had to have jumped the tracks, spun out across the rails and landed half stretched across the clearing, serpentine and now still. 

There's no way to really know when it happened, but the scene had obviously been frozen there for a while before they found it. Sam and Dean took a week to bury those inside the train. Some were still in business dress, and their own blood edged over the hemlines of their black suits, their pencil skirts and classy ties. Now, thirty-five graves mound the earth in the small clearing, thirty-five nameless corpses dressed for success beneath meadow grass and dandelions.

Sam hates walking past it.

“You went for a walk. Along the tracks.” Dean states. There’s no way Sam “just decided” to walk out past a place that nearly makes him puke every time they do have to pass it, and found Dean way out here, just as neat as that. 

Sam doesn’t give him an inch, though. “I went for a walk, Dean. Wouldn’t have if you were home, sure, but. It was just a walk.”

Dean rises up onto the balls of his feet, bouncing slightly in heavy boots. It’s an anxious give he picked up about a year ago and he knows he needs to quit it. Sure enough, Sam’s face sinks into something knowing and smug, even if it’s as subtle as a change in the shape of his eyebrows, how his lips settle together.

“Dean –“

Dean cuts him off. “I’m not an idiot. I know you still use it sometimes.”

Sam’s answer is silence, one eyebrow cocked defiantly, the rest of his body posture as defensive as Dean’s seen him. 

“Jesus, Sam.” Dean doesn’t even know how to handle this anymore. He rubs his eyes with his palms. “Jesus.”

He knows Sam’s moved closer before he takes his hands away from his face. Their shadows overlap, interlock around the knees and stretch back behind them. 

“It saved you, Dean. For all its sin and wrongness and whatever you want to call it, it saved you, and it saved me, and it’s, it’s gone now, mostly, except for what was already there, and I don’t – I don’t use it just for kicks, okay? You need. I need you to be safe. It does that.”

Dean doesn’t remember that keeping him safe. That wasn’t what kept him inside while the flood waters rose, while the sky churned black and the rain kept coming down, coming down, day in and day out, rain coming down. He reaches out absently to touch the top of the nearest stalk of wheat, lets his fingers linger over the reassuringly dry husk. 

It’s only ever drizzled from an open sky since those Days, but... 

Dean tenses and draws his arm back in, closer to his body, when Sam takes another step. 

“Dean. You know it’s not wrong. It’s just – this isn’t anything that wasn’t there already. I can’t help – “ Sam huffs, and Dean can feel the tiny burst of frustrated air across his face. He keeps his eyes down.

“You remember, Dean. I know you do,” Sam says. His voice is low, now, almost whispering even though there’s no living soul for miles. “You know it’s not wrong. Not like this.”

Dean lets Sam’s hand reach halfway between their bodies before he snaps out of it, shakes himself out of the dull haze that wrapped around him with Sam’s voice, low and close and intimate. He remembers this tone, this cadence, the hushed slide of it against his skin, over the edge of his ear, over his jaw and – 

He shoves Sam’s hand out of the way, and his “Fuck you” comes out on a breath that’s more of a gasp, shameful and shaking. 

He’s halfway across the remainder of the wheat field before he glances back. Sam’s standing where Dean left him, motionless, head bowed, staring at his hands like they're alien. 

Dean has to force his feet not to turn around, placing them one after another in deliberate forward steps until he knows he's out of sight.

 

+-+-+

 

Sam dreams about this, too, sometimes. 

Water turns the streets black, shiny and deadly under a greyscale sky. Rain lashes against the windowpane, and the door, the roof. The sound of it, the steady percussion beating over and around their heads, is incessant. 

Dean hunches and curls up against it, against the noise that never stops, and Sam listens to him grit his teeth against the babble that wants to be let loose. 

Sam watches Dean fight against a mindless terror when all around, the water rises, and the mornings never come. 

And then he doesn’t watch. He gathers Dean’s fear and…displaces it. 

It makes Dean whole before he has the chance to break, and Sam is anything but sorry.

 

+-+-+

 

Dean doesn’t dream anymore, but this is something he thinks about:

Sam as a weight against him, holding him up and tipping him away from the windows, into the long stretch of brother, of Sam, that anchors him down when everything else is being swept away. 

Sam as salt and skin, with faith in his fingers and devotion in every touch.

Sam stripped of secrets, slivered down to a sheerness that still looms over Dean any day. Sam as an olive branch while the flood waters roar against the entrances, Sam over him, around and inside him, until the drumming in his blood becomes his heartbeat again instead of the rain.

 

+-+-+

 

It’s edging in on evening when Sam finally makes it back to the house. Dean’s been restless, pacing through the kitchen and into the small living room, still bare of anything but essential furniture: a few chairs and a sofa they’re both a little wary to sit on, it looks so old, a tiny end table with water-ring stains in swirls across the wood surface.

Sam lets the front door slam and blows through the kitchen, stopping briefly. After a few moments, Dean hears the back door squeal on its hinges as Sam goes out again. 

He sighs and grabs a beer from the cooler before heading out after him.

The sunsets now are burlesque, bright and vivid colors lighting up the horizon like a slow neon sign. Dean appreciates the irony in a world that’s become the bare bones of civilization. 

He finds Sam a ways down on the beach, sitting on a large rock with his legs stretched long out in front of him. He has something clutched in his hand, and as frustrated as Dean is with everything right now, he can’t help the amused snort that escapes him when he realizes what Sam’s doing.

“Feeding the goddamn ducks,” he says, letting his eyes crinkle at the corners as he looks down on Sam, who just lazily tosses another piece of bread out onto the water, where three ducks and a haggard looking goose vie for it.

Sam tilts his head down next to him, an invitation. Dean eyes the water playing slow solitaire against the rocks of the shore here, and stays where he is.

“Freddie have too much bread in his bunker? ‘Cause fair warning, I’m gonna be pissed if that’s my breakfast toast you’re feeding to Daffy and his friends,” he says instead.

Sam rolls his eyes, then rolls to his feet in a smooth, graceful motion, brushing crumbs off his jeans. “It’s my breakfast toast, and half the loaf was bad, anyway. I had to trade maybe one potato for Alfred to let it go." Sam trails off for a second, then sighs and adds, "He was glad to see it gone.”

Dean hums an answer, distracted. The water is creeping up the sides of the rock Sam’s standing on, almost reaching Sam’s feet, the already-damp cuffs on his jeans. 

Sam follows his gaze. “Dean.”

Dean swallows, raises his eyes from the waterline with difficulty. Sam’s staring at him, eyes worried and dark.

“Dean…”, Sam says again, and Dean can’t make his voice work to tell him to fuck off, leave well enough alone. In his silence, Sam steps closer. 

Even as he feels a shiver snake up his spine, Dean manages to say, “Personal space, dude, you need to learn about it.”

Sam snorts and catches Dean by the arm, high on the bicep. Dean jerks, an involuntary spasm, but Sam’s leaning in like he’s going to tell Dean a secret, and it’s – it’s – he can’t make himself move away, can’t move, and the water on the shore is rising, pushing Sam nearer, just like before and – 

“Whoa, Dean. Dean!” Sam shakes him a little, his hand wrapping almost all the way around Dean’s upper arm, and Dean realizes his breath is coming quick and he’s shaking in little quakes, eyes wide and fastened on the nothing over Sam’s shoulder. 

Sam gentles his hand, hesitates for a second, then works his fingers underneath the sleeve of Dean’s tee a little ways, strokes the sensitive skin there with the pads of his fingers. His eyes have gone hooded, with worry and something else, still. 

Dean gets his breathing under control. And then, he steps away from Sam’s fingers, steps away from the shoreline, and walks with measured steps back to the house. 

 

+-+-+

 

Sam stays by the water for several minutes, staring down at the place where this massive lake laps so timidly at the edges of his shoes. 

After another minute or so, he crumples the paper bag of crumbs in one hand, blows out a breath and turns on his heel. His walk back to the house turns into a jog halfway there.

He catches Dean rifling half-heartedly through the refrigerator, and he doesn’t really have a plan, here, but he uses the recklessness building in his chest to tug Dean away, to slam the fridge door closed. And then, while Dean protests loudly, to take the three long steps it takes to back Dean up against the kitchen wall and pin him in with the breadth of his own body. 

Dean’s mouth is a thin, angry line. “Don’t fuck with this, Sammy. I mean it.”

Sam’s laugh isn’t amused, and it's edging in on angry. “Okay, trust me, Dean, I’m the one ‘meaning’ things, here. I’m not fucking with anything.” He ducks his head to make eye contact. “I’m not fucking with you, okay? I’m not fucking with you, or, or, doing anything for any other reason than because I want to. Clear?”

Dean just glares at him, fidgeting constantly in a way Sam knows means he’s looking for a way to escape. 

Sam gives a jerky nod, almost to himself, and then swoops in to press his mouth to Dean’s, quick and firm. 

He hears a strangled sound against his lips before Dean wrenches his head away, breathing faster and harder than the simple kiss warranted. 

Sam sees Dean brace his shoulders into the wall, and cuts him off before he can spout any bullshit. “Don’t fucking – stop acting like you’re not affected! Jesus, Dean, I was with you through the rain! You think that was just a, a distraction for me? God, Dean.” His voice lowers a register, and he brings a hand up to hover by Dean’s face. His fingers mold to the line of his jaw without touching it, centimeters away. He can still feel Dean’s skin, even without touch, through his fingers and to the bottoms of his feet; in every inch of his body he can feel it. 

“God, Dean.” He can’t help repeating himself, but god, Dean’s not running away, not hauling off and punching him, not cracking jokes in that stupid transparent way of his. He’s still tense against the wall, but his eyes are huge in his face, and they’re watching Sam with a fierceness that makes Sam’s blood surge up in his veins. 

“It was never about the floods for me, Dean. Just. Please. Let me?” He’s whispering by now, like the words are sacred, the syllables something holy and hushed.

And maybe they are, because Dean tilts his head and lets him, and it roars through Sam when he presses his lips in again against Dean’s. It’s still almost chaste, except for how it completely, absolutely isn’t.

Dean shudders, and Sam can feel it under his mouth. He wants to wreck Dean into stillness, settles instead for moving his lips across the sharp line of Dean’s jaw. 

When Dean moans, Sam drags his tongue over the spot it rumbles from, under Dean’s jaw, where the skin is vulnerable and thin. When Dean slides back against the wall, Sam pushes in to fill the space, and Dean doesn’t refuse him, spreads his thighs to accommodate and that’s just – 

Sam bites down on his shoulder, can taste sweat and soap through the fabric of Dean’s tee shirt, and he appreciates the almost-noises Dean makes in his chest at the pressure of his teeth. He mouths at the cloth, likes how he can make it wet, and Dean brings a hand to his hip, presses him closer. 

There’s a hesitation, here, even as the room thrums around them and the air goes heavy, before Sam returns to Dean’s mouth and covers it with his own. It’s familiar, from months ago, when he licked in and spread Dean out, made him forget everything but Sam and safety and faith, so much faith.

Dean gasps something against Sam’s jaw, nonsensical and fervent, and his fingers dig in hard against the bones of Sam’s hips. The memory of him, mindless and boneless and completely given up to Sam, drives itself into Sam’s mind with a vengeance, and when Sam shudders hard into Dean, Dean takes it into himself, passes it back. Shaking fingers and sweat-damp skin, breath that whines with every in-and-out, hands shackling wrists and legs that open perfectly, push in perfectly, strain just right: this is what Sam remembers, and this is what Sam knows again. He can barely breathe with it. 

He remembers this, how Dean uses his teeth when he’s close - nipping across Sam’s lower lip, then sucking it smooth again in unthinking fits – and if he pushes closer, leans his leg up so Dean has more friction in the long muscle of Sam’s thigh while he shudders out his orgasm, he’s still relearning how it goes. 

 

+++

 

Dean climbs onto the boat on the fifteenth, next month, ignores the water sloshing against the sleek fiberglass sides, ignores the white parachute sky with clouds sidling in along the horizon, and looks at Sam.


End file.
